
        31 March 1995

        To: TW 2.05 Sysops
        From: Craig Healy

        Re: EXTERN replacement

        The Tradewars 2.0x (Beta) series has been plagued with a
        series of bugs. These range from the Ship Records bug that
        commonly assigns two Players to the same ship number, to
        "inheriting" Ferrengi grudges from deleted Players. There
        are *many* smaller, but still insidious bugs in this Beta.
        Martech had promised a new Beta promptly after the 13 Feb
        1994 2.05 game, but as of today - over a year later - no 
        new version has been released.  In an attempt to make the 
        2.05 at least playable, I wrote an EXTERN replacement
        which hopefully minimizes many of these bugs.

        To install the EXTERN replacement, uncompress TW2EXT10.ZIP
        into your Tradewars directory. Example command:
        PKUNZIP TW2EXT10.ZIP C:\TRADEWARS\
        Then, run the batch file EXTINSTL.BAT which does the work.
        It renames the original EXTERN.EXE to EXTERN.MAR, and
        runs a utility to create a file of the Major Space Lanes.
        Many thanks to Albin Gersich for providing this utility.
        
        If you are updating to a newer version of the replacement
        EXTERN, type: COPY EXTERN.SCH EXTERN.EXE
        
        Since the EXTERN.EXE file is the same name, your BBS
        maintenance batch file need not be changed. This new
        EXTERN checks to see if it has run already that day, and
        if so, exits. It is possible to call this after every
        player if you like.

        Other utilities available are TW2EDIT (replaces TEDIT),
        TW2SHIP and TW2PLAN, Ship and Planet statistics editors.
        All are freeware.
